A Preliminary Investigation of the Taxonomic Status of Desmognathus Monticola Jeffersoni

Undergraduate Basi

Public Financing of Elections After Citizens United and Arizona Free Enterprise

Based on political contribution records from six Midwestern states, compares the projected impact of providing small-donor public matching funds to that of lowering contribution limits on election participation by a diverse mix of donors

Amino Acids in Asteroids and Comets: Implications for the Origin of Life on Earth and Possibly Elsewhere

Meteorites provide a record of the chemical processes that occurred in the early solar system before life began on Earth. The delivery of organic matter by asteroids, comets, and their fragments to the Earth and other planetary bodies in our solar system could have been an important source of the prebiotic organic inventory needed for the emergence of life. Amino acids are essential components of proteins and enzymes in life on Earth and these prebiotic organic compounds have been detected in a wide variety of carbon-rich meteorites, the majority of which have been determined to be extraterrestrial in origin. In addition, many amino acids are structurally chiral (they possess handedness) and with a few very rare exceptions, only left handed (L) amino acids are found in biology, while all known abiotic syntheses of amino acids result in equal mixtures of left and right handed (L~D) amino acids. The discovery of a significant left handed amino acid imbalance of up to 20% in several different carbonaceous meteorites, could point toward a possible prebiotic contribution to the origin of biological homochirality by the exogenous delivery of extraterrestrial organic material to the early Earth. In this talk, I will focus on recent state-of-the-art measurements of the distribution, chirality, and isotopic composition of amino acids in meteorites and cometary samples carried out at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory. Results from the analyses of a variety of Antarctic meteorites, samples from comet Wild 2 returned by the STARDUST mission, and meteorite fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 called Almahata Sitta recovered from northern Sudan will be discusse

Donor Diversity through Public Matching Funds

New York State is considering a system of public campaign financing for state elections similar to the one New York City uses for municipal elections. In that system, the city puts up six dollars in public matching funds for each of the first $175 that a city resident contributes to a candidate participating in the voluntary program.One of the key purposes of the city's matching fund program is to strengthen the connections between public officials and their constituents by bringing more small donors into the process and making them more important to the candidates' campaigns. A previous paper by the Campaign Finance Institute showed that matching funds heighten the number and role of small donors in city elections and would be likely to do the same at the state level.This joint study by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Campaign Finance Institute tests whether these powerful but anecdotal claims are supported by the available evidence from the most recent state and municipal elections. To do so, we compared donors to candidates in the City Council elections of 2009, where there was a public financing program, to the donors to candidates in the State Assembly elections of 2010, where there was no such program. We compared the City Council and State Assembly races because those electoral districts are similar in size and because doing so allowed us to look at the giving patterns of the same city residents in different elections

The relationship of quizzing and student success in a college level core statistics course

This study investigated the relationship between quizzing and student success in an introductory college level statistics course. Demographic and student performance data were collected from a 100-level introductory Statistics course at the University of New Mexico during the Fall 2011 semester. Two statistical models were developed to determine if quizzing is related to student success as measured by final letter grades and final exam scores. Predictive modeling to determine the relationship between quizzing and students final exam scores using a Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) found quizzing to be marginally significant (p-value = 0.0567). Probabilistic modeling using logistic regression to predict if a student passes the course with a grade of C or higher yielded an odds ratio of 6.013 (95% Wald CI: 2.030, 17.813) for students who were given periodic quizzes versus students who were not given quizzes, while holding all other variables in the model constant. Results indicate that quizzing is positively associated with student performance